


Darkest, DARKEST Rauatai Cookies

by rannadylin



Series: Watcher Violet [1]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Baking, Chocolate, Fluff, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 14:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11739072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rannadylin/pseuds/rannadylin
Summary: Aloth and Watcher Violet come across a mysterious recipe in an old journal. Baking hijinks ensue.





	Darkest, DARKEST Rauatai Cookies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ohlawsons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohlawsons/gifts).



> For the 2017 Pillars of Eternity Fic Swap at the prompting of ohlawsons, whose excellent suggestions included, inter alia, a look into Violet's baking habits as well as her time spent reading in the library with Aloth. (I love it when it works out to combine such different prompts in one fic so this was a lot of fun!)

“How odd,” Aloth’s voice broke softly into Violet’s thoughts. She looked up from the tome propped open on her knees, where she sat curled up in an overstuffed chair far too large for her, tucked into a corner of Caed Nua’s library. She rubbed at her eyes, tired from hours of searching for clues to her predicament as Watcher. Such books as they had been able to recover from the mess left of Maerwald’s time at the keep were generally not in the best condition and thoroughly lacking in organization, so it was a slow and exhausting process.

“Odd? What’s odd?” she asked, twitching an ear in his direction.

He gestured to the dilapidated pages spread out before him on a lectern near one of the recently restored shelves. “It appears to be a recipe.”

“A recipe?” she echoed him again. “You’re reading cookbooks now?”

“I am not,” he narrowed his eyes in a glance her way. “It seems to be the journal of a medic traveling with a caravan that sheltered here early in Maerwald’s reconstruction of Caed Nua, well before he…” Aloth met Violet’s eyes and winced in allusion to their mutual predicament. “Well. You know.”

“A medic.” She yawned, shoved her book aside, and hopped down from the chair to get a closer look at Aloth’s find. “You think this medic might have examined our...forebear?”

“I’d hoped so,” Aloth nodded, “but mostly it’s been notes about the other lands the group had traveled through. The references to Caed Nua were fairly early on, so I’m not sure how the journal even ended up back here. I was about to give up on this and look for another.”

“And suddenly, a recipe.” Violet grinned and stood on tip-toe to get a closer look at the journal on Aloth’s folk-sized lectern. “Maybe our medic just liked to cook.”

Aloth tugged thoughtfully at a lock of hair hanging over his shoulder as he scooted over to make room for the curious Watcher. “I’m not sure it belongs to the journal, though. The parchment seems newer, and there’s been no mention of cooking before this.” He lifted the page in question from the lectern and handed it down to her.

“Oh! It’s loose?” She handled the page gingerly, turning it from side to side in search of tell-tale holes where it might have been torn from its binding.

“The whole book’s unbound,” Aloth explained. “Just a collection of the caravan’s adventures, scribbled on odds and ends of any material the writer could find, apparently. But they do seem to have been kept in order, and this one appears far less faded than the rest.”

Violet scanned the lines of ink, scribed in a precise hand but softened and smudged with time. “And definitely a recipe. My goodness, that’s an awful lot of cocoa it calls for.”

Aloth peered over her shoulder and nodded. “Relatively so.”

“Hm…” Violet ran a finger down the list, brightening as a chocolate-filled suspicion occurred to her. “We probably have that much left over from what we picked up at The Wailing Banshee, though. And I’m sure the kitchen has fresh eggs today.”

“Hold on,” Aloth said with a frown. “You’re not thinking of cooking this, are you?”

“Looks more like baking, actually,” she shrugged, then smiled up at him. “And why not?”

“For one thing, we don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. It’s a vague list of ingredients and minimal instructions with no title.”

Violet was already on her way to the door. “I’ve got a decent guess. Are you coming or aren’t you?”

He blinked, his hands fluttering to the edge of the lectern. “I’m sure I would be of more use here --”

“So might I. But we could both use a break, Aloth. Also delicious cookies.” She winked at him and waved the parchment towards the door.

“Cookies?”

“I think that’s what we’re making, anyway.”

Aloth hesitated but soon followed after her, huffing a sigh. “Fine. But since when do you cook, anyway?”

“All the time!”

“I’ve never seen you do it.”

“Well, you’ve mostly seen me on the road, haven’t you? Baking like this calls for a proper kitchen.”

“Which, at Caed Nua, is currently under construction, you’ll recall.”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll manage,” she laughed, grabbing his hand as he caught up to her and tugging him along with her to Brighthollow and its improvised, temporary kitchen.

* * *

Nearly an hour later, Aloth brushed at a wayward dusting of cocoa powder on his tunic, his lips pursed in distaste.

“You’ll only rub it in deeper,” Violet advised, shoving a bowl of a dark brown batter up at him. “Here. Stir in the chocolate chips while I find a baking sheet.”

“Shouldn’t we have found the baking sheet _first_?” Aloth pointed out, dutifully stirring.

Violet’s laugh sounded from within one of the larger cabinets. “I sort of hoped we’d unearth them in the process of finding the chocolate.”

“Please tell me renovating the kitchen is next on the Steward’s list. Or at least an inventory of whatever’s in here?”

Violet emerged, triumphantly waving an only slightly misshapen sheet of metal. “On the bright side, we’ll be half done with that inventory by the time we perfect these cookies.”

Aloth sneaked a taste of the batter in his bowl and grimaced.

“What is it?” Violet asked as she ran a cloth over the metal sheet, scrubbing at decades of accumulated dust. “Too much cocoa?”

“Too much sugar, I think,” Aloth said.

“Don’t tell me we’ve finally found the limit to that Aedyran sweet tooth of yours,” Violet beamed at him.

“Violet, we put in nearly three times as much sugar as anything else. Are you sure you read that part right?”

“Might be a bit smudged…” she admitted, picking up the recipe to squint at it in the light squeezing through a crack in the kitchen’s wall.

“Also, is there nothing in there about flour? What sort of cookies are these?”

Violet grinned and took the bowl from him to begin spooning batter-lumps onto her tray. “That’s the thing, you see. I’ve only once heard of cookies made with sugar and cocoa and eggs, but no flour or butter.” She glanced at him from beneath a raised eyebrow, waiting for him to make the connection.

Aloth’s eyes narrowed in thought, then soon widened in remembrance. “The ambassador?”

“The one from Rauatai,” she nodded. “Who paid her respects to the new management at Caed Nua while Kana happened to be away on an errand for me. Remember how disappointed he was when he got back and we’d finished off the cookies she brought?”

Aloth chuckled. “He practically composed a recipe in verse form on the spot, as I recall.”

“A recipe devoid of flour and rich in sugar and cocoa.”

“Only Kana could make a tragic poem out of cookies,” Aloth sighed. Then he smirked. “I wondered why you bought so much cocoa the last time we were in Defiance Bay.”

“I _did_ decide against attempting to recreate the cookies based on Kana’s poem alone,” Violet admitted. “But I think we have a shot at it now!” She finished scooping the last of the batter onto the tray and nodded to the oven door. “How’s it looking in there?”

Aloth gingerly swung the ancient oven’s front panel open on the one hinge that remained to it and peered in at the glowing coals. “Like there might still be a Will O’Wisp or two hiding in here, honestly.”

“Well, banish them so we can get these cookies made,” she retorted, lifting the tray and carefully stepping over what remained of the debris that had littered the kitchen when they first explored Brighthollow.

* * *

The minutes passed slowly. Violet sat in quiet confectionery contemplation, focusing her senses of sight as well as smell on the oven. Aloth stood tapping his foot, alternately watching the oven and then the Watcher, reading over the recipe parchment again and again for lack of any other text to peruse.

Finally, his voice broke into her thoughts once again. “This is a lot of work just for cookies.”

“But very remarkable cookies,” Violet pointed out, still staring at the oven, “if I’m right about the recipe.”

“Still.”

“Also,” she admitted, “I wanted to make it up to Kana for missing the ambassador’s batch.”

“That was...weeks ago.”

“Well, if I’d had a recipe then…”

Aloth sighed and came to sit by her. “I suppose it’s obvious I...have no experience with this sort of thing.”

She greeted him with a warm smile and a nudge to the ribs. “Hurray for new experiences, then. And cookies.”

“Indeed.” He sniffed at the aroma of chocolate now sharp in the air. “Does it always take so long?”

“It’s only been a few minutes,” she laughed. “Cookies are fairly quick to bake, I think.”

“You think?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “I thought you did this _all the time_.”

“Well.” Violet shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of cooking since I set out on my own. One doesn’t as often have the opportunity to bake as an adventurer, though. It’s the sort of luxury you get to experience after liberating an ancient keep, I presume.”

“Maybe for those who liberate keeps with fully functional kitchens. But I suppose there are worse ways to spend an afternoon,” Aloth allowed. And sniffed the air again. “Should it take much longer, do you think?”

Violet shook her head. “It’s probably been long enough. Shall we?” She gestured to the oven, and Aloth sighed with relief and hurried to hold its door open for her to lift out the tray with the aid of the same cloth that had earlier cleaned it -- the only scrap of fabric to be found in the mess of the kitchen.

She set the tray down on the table. They both stood over it, frowning. Finally, Violet peeled one of the oddly flat, shiny-brown disks from the tray and twisted off a piece. She offered it to Aloth along with a hopeful smile but he shook his head, his expression disavowing all responsibility for the outcome of this experiment. So Violet nibbled on the scrap of the hypothetical cookie herself.

“Hm,” she said after a moment.

“It doesn’t quite look like the other batch,” Aloth pointed out helpfully.

“It tastes a little like it!” she insisted, shoving a cookie in his direction again. Aloth relented and tasted their odd creation for himself.

“Hm,” he echoed her.

“Well?”

“It does taste...similar,” he said. “But I don’t recall them being so crisp.”

“Perhaps we left it in too long,” Violet wondered.

“Or we left out an ingredient that our mystery writer failed to record. Or we mixed things in the wrong order. Or our oven is oddly cantankerous after being out of commission so long.”

“Are you sure you’ve never baked before?” she grinned. “We could try again. Experiment with it.”

“If only we hadn’t used up practically all the cocoa,” he reminded her.

Violet’s face fell. “I really did want to surprise Kana with them.”

“They’re certainly surprising,” Aloth muttered under his breath. But at the sight of the Watcher’s downturned ears, he hesitated, then reached to awkwardly pat her back before hastily gathering the cookies -- or whatever they were -- up into a basket. “Violet,” he soothed, “in what world could you imagine Kana Rua not being pleased at your intentions, no matter how the cookies turned out?”

Violet considered this and then nodded. “True enough.” She surprised her elven friend by reaching up to squeeze him into a quick hug, before stepping up to the table to help him finish the gathering.

* * *

They presented the basket of cookies -- some shattered to pieces, some twisted in odd shapes, all just a bit overcooked and smelling strongly of caramelized sugar along with the chocolate -- to Kana that evening, after luring him into the library, that being the one place in the Keep where the three of them were most at home and least likely to be bothered by the rest of their small society.

“Hm,” Kana said, tasting.

“We thought so too,” Violet nodded solemnly.

“Mind you,” Aloth interjected, “we’re not even certain what the recipe was for. Perhaps this rather...stiff texture is intended.”

“Could be,” Kana nodded pleasantly, breaking another chocolatey disc in half while taking another look at the recipe where Aloth had spread it out on the lectern. “It is interesting how easily they can break, if pressure is applied quickly, and yet they just as easily bend under gentle pressure. Perhaps there’s a metaphor here.” He tapped a finger to his chin, holding the cookie fragment up before his eyes.

“Does the recipe look right, though?” Violet asked.

Kana chuckled and scratched at his head. “You know, I’ve never actually seen a written recipe for these cookies. I suppose it could be.”

Violet and Aloth exchanged a glance. “But you recited all the ingredients for us once!” Violet pointed out.

“In verse,” Aloth added dryly.

“Oh, I recalled all that from watching my mother make them on occasions when I was younger. Not very often, you know. They were the sort of thing reserved for very special days. The last time I had them -- well, it was when I set out on my journey. Though I suppose you could hardly expect I’d have had them since leaving Rauatai!” His booming laugh echoed among the shelves for a moment, till he noticed his friends awkwardly looking away. “Oh,” Kana said, stretching the sound out while he lowered the cookie fragment to the basket again. “You, ah, were expecting just that today.”

“I’m sorry they didn’t turn out, Kana,” said Violet.

“There’s more to it than just the ingredients, from what I recall,” Kana shrugged. “Not that I, ah, ever learned it too precisely. But you know, why don’t I just write home and ask for a proper recipe?” He grinned toothily at them. “If you’re interested in giving it another try, that is. Of course, it’ll take some time to get a reply.”

Violet and Aloth exchanged another glance. When he sighed and nodded, she turned back to Kana with a smile. “Just enough time to send to The Wailing Banshee for more cocoa!”


End file.
